Italian Elitism and the Reshaping of Democracy in the United States PDF Download

Author: Giorgio Volpe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000362329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book deals with the reception of Italian elitism in the United States, identifying its key protagonists, phases, and themes. It starts from the reconstruction of the scientific and political debates aroused in the United States by the works of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, and moves on to define their theoretical influence in the American scientific and academic contexts. The analysis takes into consideration the period from the first contact between elitists and American academia in the early 1920s to the publication of The Power Elite by Mills, in 1956, which marks the emancipation of American elitism. After introducing the fundamental principles of elite theory, the first part of the study reconstructs the debate that it aroused beyond the Atlantic. The second part examines the original American reworking of the elitist lesson, concentrating on the works of the authors most strongly influenced by it: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Harold D. Lasswell, and Charles W. Mills. The book aims to shed light on the contribution of Italian elitism to the development of American political thought.

Author: Guido Abbattista
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000423255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats coming from the Italian peninsula contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization. It also examines how these individuals represented different parts of the world to an Italian audience, and how deeply Italian culture drew inspiration from the increasing knowledge of world ‘Otherness’. The first part of the book focuses on the production of knowledge, drawing on texts written by philosophers, scientists, historians and numerous other first-hand eyewitnesses. The second part analyses the dissemination and popularization of knowledge by focussing on previously understudied published works and initiatives aimed at learned Italian readers and the general public. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern and modern European history, as well as those interested in global history.

Author: Matilde Cazzola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000480844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados.

Author: Matthew D’Auria
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000649628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe the Mediterranean is conspicuously absent. This might partly be explained by the fact that historians have often identified Europe with modernity (and the Atlantic world) and, therefore, in opposition to the classical world (centred around the Mediterranean). This book will challenge such views, showing that a plethora of thinkers, from the early nineteenth century to the present, have refused to relegate the Mediterranean to the past. Importance is given to the idea of a distinct ‘meridian thought’, a notion first set forth by Albert Camus and now reworked by French and Italian thinkers. As most chapters argue, this might represent an important tool for rethinking the Mediterranean and, in turn, it might help us challenge received notions about European identity and rethink Europe as the locus of ‘modernity’. Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in European studies and Mediterranean history.

Author: Maria Grasso
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1803921234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 723

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Book Description
This comprehensive and authoritative Encyclopedia, featuring entries written by academic experts in the field, explores the diverse topics within the discipline of political sociology. By looking at both macro- and micro-components, questions relating to nation-states, political institutions and their development, and the sources of social and political change such as social movements and other forms of contentious politics, are raised and critically analysed.

Author: William Genieys
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031415825
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book examines the history of the French welfare state from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. The French social security system has changed profoundly over the last few decades. The Bismarkian model of governance and social protection inherited from the Second World War has progressively faded away in favor of a reinforcement of the state’s capacity to intervene on policies and the implementation of national health insurance coverage. In order to understand this major transformation, this book draws on rich original sources to offer a historical and sociological perspective on elite policymakers and policy change. In doing so, it identifies correlations between the changing social backgrounds and career paths of elites in charge of social insurance policies since the 1940s, and the development of health policy programs. It will appeal to all those interested in public policy, health policy, social studies and French history and politics.

Author: John Higley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153816289X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This provocative and groundbreaking book challenges accepted wisdom about the role of elites in both maintaining and undermining democracy in an increasingly authoritarian world. John Higley traces patterns of elite political behavior and the political orientations of non-elite populations throughout modern history to show what is and is not possible in contemporary politics. He situates these patterns and orientations in a range of regimes, showing how they have played out in revolutions, populist nationalism, Arab Spring failures to democratize, the conflation of ultimate and instrumental values in today’s liberal democracies, and American political thinkers’ misguided assumption that non-elites are the principal determinants of politics. Critiquing the optimistic outlooks prevalent among educated Westerners, Higley considers them out of touch with reality because of spreading employment insecurity, demoralization, and millennial pursuits in their societies. Attacks by domestic and foreign terrorists, effects of climate change, mass migrations from countries outside the West, and disease pandemics exacerbate insecurity and further highlight the flaws in the belief that democracy can thrive and spread worldwide. Higley concludes that these threats to the well-being of Western societies are here to stay. They leave elites with no realistic alternative to a holding operation until at least mid-century that husbands the power and political practices of Western societies. Drawing on decades of research, Higley’s analysis is historically and comparatively informed, bold, and in some places dark—and will be sure to foster debate.

Author: Andrew G. Bonnell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Robert Michels (1876-1936) is best known for his 1911 book Political Parties, which is still a standard reference in political science debates. Michels' work sought to prove an "iron law of oligarchy" that governs the organisational evolution of democratic political parties. The work was closely informed by Michels' engagement with the German Social Democratic Party in the early 1900s, his involvement in radical politics in France and Italy in this period, and by his interest in a range of intellectual and social movements - including feminism, nationalism, racial theory, and the emerging disciplines of sociology and political science. Using archival and printed sources hitherto overlooked in work on Michels, this new study contests previous arguments which have sought to explain Michels as a disillusioned adherent of ideas of direct democracy or as an extremist moving from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism. The biographical and intellectual influences on Michels are shown to be more complex, and more transnational, than such schematic explanations have allowed. Andrew Bonnell sheds new light on Michels' relationship with the German Social Democratic Party and on his understanding of his own role as an intellectual in a workers' party. Bonnell also analyses Michels' problematical relationship with revolutionary syndicalism in France and Italy. Michels was connected to a possibly uniquely diverse network of intellectual and political contacts in pre-1914 Europe. This transnational intellectual history illuminates the intellectual worlds in which Michels moved and presents a new interpretation of his shift from the radical left of the spectrum to Italian fascism, an intellectual itinerary which has intrigued many historians.

Author: Dr Alasdair J Marshall
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409491013
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Vilfredo Pareto is a key figure in the history of economics and sociology. His sociological works attempted to merge these two disciplines through a psychologistic analysis of society, economy and politics. This is the first book to rethink Pareto's contribution to classical sociology by focusing upon its psychological underpinning. The author locates the origins of Pareto's psychologistic approach both within the history of Italian thought and within Pareto's own experiences of business and politics. He evaluates Pareto's sociology through the lens of contemporary social science, examining whether its explanatory power is growing rather than diminishing as levels of social and epistemological complexity rise. The volume also explores Pareto's assumptions about personality through the lens of contemporary psychology. It concludes with a psychometric study of Westminster MPs which clarifies and attests to Pareto's contemporary relevance, and indicates that even practitioners of politics may gain much from reading Pareto.

Author: Luigi Ceccarini
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030136175
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This book provides a lively and comprehensive account of the unprecedented Italian general election of 2018 and of its profound significance for Italy and beyond. The contributions in this volume cover the political, economic and international contexts in which the vote took place, and consider the main election contenders in the run-up to the election as well as the campaigns. The book further examines the election outcome, analysing the votes and discussing the impact of the election on the turnover of parliamentary personnel as well as examining the outcome from the viewpoint of government formation.